DeepSeek — the founder

Liang Wenfeng (梁文锋)

Born 1985 in Zhanjiang, a port city in southern Guangdong — a region that spent the eighties and nineties rewarding business over study. Liang was the exception: the academically inclined kid who taught himself calculus in junior high, went to Zhejiang University at 17, and finished a master's in information and communication engineering in 2010, with a specialization in machine vision.

2008 — While still at Zhejiang University, he starts writing machine-learning algorithms to analyze market trends and macro data for trading. A quant is born in a university dormitory.

2013 — Found Hangzhou Yakebi Investment Management with Xu Jin, also a Zhejiang University alum.

2015 — Co-founds High-Flyer with Xu Jin. The fund trades with deep learning; by 2017, most decisions are AI-made. Portfolio peaks above $12B.

2019 — Founds High-Flyer AI for AI-algorithm research.

2023 — Announces the AGI pivot; spins off DeepSeek on July 17. Venture capital says no; Liang and High-Flyer say fine, we'll fund it ourselves. Also this year: the famous claim that High-Flyer had already acquired 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before US export restrictions tightened. The GPUs were always the plan.

The founder in one paragraph

Western media calls him "China's Sam Altman." He dislikes the comparison and has given roughly two rare interviews (both to the Chinese outlet 36Kr). He is a hedge fund founder who says the goal is AGI, a researcher-CEO who describes DeepSeek's funding model — no commercial pressure, no rigid KPIs — as the reason the lab can try architectures no one else would. By May 2024 he personally held an 84% stake in DeepSeek through two shell companies; by his own account, High-Flyer's partnership holds ~99%. Either way: one founder, one hedge fund, one very public math problem.

The company history: DeepSeek — company history · The origin story: DeepSeek — the origin story.